That way, they would have detail in them, they’d convey feelings rather than rhetorical positions, and the weather would be less of a trial. Also, the people in them wouldn’t be bow-legged fantasists in cowboy hats.
Moorer is herself a tall, wiry, straight-legged woman of 28, yellow of hair, with petrol-blue eyes. She looks like the sort of woman over whom really good country songwriters might suck their pencils – perhaps born and raised in a tiny settlement in the Alabama woodlands (a church, a store, a barn) to umpteenth-generation farmers; perhaps surrounded by dogs, cats, cows, logs, lightning bugs and, in the distance like an electric fence, heat lightning. There’d be crickets, too, failing to shut up for a second.She’d go to college, then drift to Nashville where her sister is striving to cut it on the big-hat music scene, do a little harmony, meet a tattooed songwriter called Butch Primm, marry the hunk and find to her astonishment that their union releases in her a talent for songwriting.

She’d then be that pencil sucker.Moorer’s second record, The Hardest Part, is just out, and it’s about as good as contemporary country music gets; possibly better. It’s an album predicated on its opening, title track, which proposes that “the hardest part of living is loving, ’cause loving turns to leaving every time”. This cheerful item is followed by 10 more songs which back up its thesis with discipline and at a range of different levels. Records both as thoroughly grown-up and deeply felt as this are hard to find.

The writing is tight, intelligent, bitterly detailed and wholly sophisticated. Moorer’s contralto is dark brown and as lived-in as the songs.”No, this isn’t pessimism,” she says coolly, her Alabamian vowels lapping her consonants like muddy water, “and it certainly isn’t cynical, as somebody suggested to me the other day It’s just the truth. No matter the kind of love you have – whether it’s with a parent, sibling, friend or whatever – it’s not going to last forever One person’s gonna leave – or they’re gonna die. Love is not forever, and this is a reality you have to face.” She drops her protuberant lower lip, looks up. “Face it and it’ll give you strength.” Moorer is the younger sister of Shelby Lynne, the Nashville blow-hard who hit paydirt with her generically diffuse, Bill “Sheryl Crow” Bottrell-produced album I Am…, released here towards the end of last year.